The invention relates to the field of wireless communications, for instance to spread spectrum techniques such as Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA). It has particular applicability to 1xEV-DO.
Direct sequence spread spectrum (DS-SS) systems include transmitters and receivers. A spread-spectrum signal is produced for transmission by modulating and then spreading an original signal, employing a Pseudorandom Noise (PN) sequence. The receiver needs to de-spread the signal it receives, and then demodulate the de-spread signal. To do so, the receiver performs an “initial code acquisition” which employs a receiver-generated replica of the PN sequence. That PN sequence is synchronized with that of the received signal, in order to de-spread the received signal, and then to demodulate the de-spread signal. The initial code acquisition in both phase and frequency has been a challenging problem, because of factors including the uncertainties in the estimated time delay and frequency offset.